Floppyhead – Digital Media and Streaming

Microsoft’s Vista is an important step in the evolution of the media center and the home theater computer since it will support CableCARD and HD DVD’s ‘Managed Copy.’ I have discussed Vista’s CableCARD implementation alot on this site but have not talked at all about HD DVD support. So exactly what is ‘Managed Copy?’ Currently, HD DVD is the only next-gen DVD format to provide for the ability to legally make copies of optical content. Dubbed ‘Managed Copy,’ HD DVD implements part of the AACS control mechanism to allow for things such as putting digital copies of a disc on a hard drive, transferring a movie (legally) to a portable player, or streaming content on a home network. It is an often neglected feature of the HD-DVD standard. All HD DVD’s are required to implement ‘managed copy.’

A media center computer has the potential to perform the following three tasks: 1) managing your music, 2) recording live television, and 3) managing your ripped DVDs. Current media centers handle music very well while HDTV support is limited to over the air broadcasts. DVD’s must be ripped ‘illegally’ in order to store them on a computer. ‘Managed Copy’ would make ripping your movies to you computer much simpler and even legal. Ripping movies could become a built in feature of a media center. I expect that HD DVD users with media centers will be able to pop in a disc, copy it to a hard drive (with DRM translation in effect), and build a digital library that way (at 20-30 GB for each movie, a digital library would take up alot of space though hard drives are constantly falling in price so hopefully this will become more feasible in the next year or two).

The HD DVD format will be integrated into Vista. Beyond that though, very little details about Vista’s implementation of ‘managed copy’ have actually been made available to the public. First generation HD DVD players do not support ‘managed copy,’ though hopefully this will change with the second generation of players due this month. No PC-based drives are available, not counting the Xbox 360 HD DVD drive.

Like CableCARD, HD DVD is not guaranteed to be on asuccess with media centers. The lack of details make me concerned about the features Vista’s media center will have reagarding HD DVD. The main problem with ‘managed copy’ is that the studios have the option of charging additional money for the use of your copy. In my opinion, this would essentially kill ‘Managed Copy’ and would drive more customers to piracy. I guess time will tell how successful HHD DVD will be on the computer.

It should be noted that Blu-ray has stated that they will implement some form of ‘managed copy’ as well though it is not a mandatory feature of the format.